Yeah, I get all that too. I think my problem was that I sort of misunderstood what Node is. I've always thought of it as a web server, not a language runtime. So to me it seemed like using Node to run command-line tools was akin to doing

  python -m http.server my_cool_cli_thing

which is, of course, a bananas way to do things. But now that I've dug into it a little more I see that this is a misapprehension that I formed based on Node's original use case as an event-driven web server.

Thanks again.